I do not know the guy in the video, although he is german. But the guy building those "glasses" is a friend of mine. He is knee deep into this ancient gaming thing, building Atari roms (including DRM protection...) for the guys who are coding the games, etc. This is his homepage: http://www.madtronix.com/en/

I was not suggesting he does, although he seems to have intimate knowledge of the system. I just always thought of that as some unobtainable system growing up at a time when my friends had the VideoBrain and later the ColeCovison and other seemingly more advanced systems when we had to share the already ancient 2600 console, and later computing on a TS-1000 from Montgomery Wards for the cut rate of $35 when it was on close out.

I am more or less saying I enjoy his resourcefulness, and hopes he continues in his passion to extend an already obsolete system and even come up with a new theme for himself as well as he seems able to grock quite a bit.

I was able to play on teletypes on occasion and check out some fairly good books on the subject of building a computer back in the day, but it was still a rich mans game (or one where you had to know a mentor to build a system). There were resources like Don Lancasters TV Teletype:

I'm logged into Uncensored right now using something resembling a Commodore
64 running Linux. Well, not quite.

I downloaded a Commodore 64 font onto my laptop and set the terminal program
to run with that font at 40x24 screen dimensions (or was the C-64 40x25?
I don't remember). It was totally unusable. 80x24 didn't look right either,
because the width to height ratio of the font was designed for 40 columns.

So I set it to 80x48 to maintain the correct ratio. Despite the fact that
it's four times as many characters on the screen than an actual C-64, it's
got the same look.

(Except for the colors. There's no way I'm setting my terminal to cyan text
on a blue background. I didn't like it 30 years ago either.)

Warning, TLDR and all that: more boring stuff to come (and I hope from you, the reader as well).

Apple II - 4th grade (school owned) - it lived on a cart and was wheeled from room to room in the school back then.

Some sort of teletype in the middle school days (school owned). I was allowed to be around when someone had it print snoopy in ascii. Not impressed at all :-)

Older brother aquires a TS-1000 on closeout at Montgomery Wards for around $30. He gives up on it and gives it to me. Score!.. - long bit of learning to code / hack it (db9 for joystick), expansion bus projects... Much fun to be had there. Still have that artifact and the shoe goo carved in to it db9 connector for a joystick port.

Apple II+ / IIe - High School (school owned). Did some interesting programming on them with sprites and basic. Was more fun, but not quite as fun as the TS-1000 as you only had so much time to hack away at them.

Later, a TI-99/4a - later high school (given by my grandfather). Grandpa had moved on to an IBM PC and gave me his TI-99/4A. Liked that thing for the extra bits that I could not buy (color, sound, etc)... Did some fine video and sound work on that thing. Fun, but slow machine.

An Amstrad PC-20 (8086 Amiga A500 looking thing) - it did run an emulators well and got me through college. An internal 3 1/2 720 and external 5 1/4 floppy. Word processor with spell check on the other disk was quite nice. It played Dead Smurf and Castle Wolfenstein quite well as I remember. Quite a change in my computing world. It became a workhorse, instead of an inspiration to do new stuff. Kinda sucked the life out of me :-(

Mostly boring stuff from there (apart from the can it run Linux purchases) which are now ancient history.

I never had the chance to play with the Atari computer. A lot of people
swore by them back in the day, though.

Oh, and the C-128 (which I should have included with the other Commodore
stuff at the beginning of this post). I played with both the CP/M
and C-128 side of the machine, as well as the C-64 side (if I recall). It
was a bit like having three machines in one.

In college, I had a chance to fool around on a VAX. That's an interesting
OS, although I didn't get into the bowels of it much. And those Sun Workstations
were also kind of fun, if more generically unix.

I think, maybe, that covers everything I've touched from college to my first
computer (the TRS-80 III was the first machine I used).

The TI-99 came so close to being a decent machine. I once met one of the engineers (Herb Taylor) and learned all sorts of interesting things about it.

Originally the computer was supposed to use the TMS 9985 processor, which was less expensive than the TMS 9900. But supply and reliability issues caused them to change to the 9900 at the last minute, which led to a lot of the limitations of the machine.

The speech synthesizer module was actually the same chipset at the TI "Speak & Spell" toy.

I had a TI-99 as well but it basically sat in my closet. My uncle gave it
to me, but I didn't know how to work it, so it just sat. I love retro computing
now and so wish I still had it but I have no idea where it is. I think it
was stolen but I really don't know. Sad too, just sat in the box.

My TI-99 was put to good use as parts which went into all sorts of other projects.
It had a surprisingly good power supply which fed various things well into
the 1990's. The RF modulator was quite reusable. Various plugs and fittings
were cannibalized as well. About the only thing that didn't get re-used was
the motherboard.

The RF modulator has an interesting history. TI couldn't get their RF modulator
design approved in time for the original TI-99 product launch. So they originally
sold the machine with an included monitor -- basically a Sony television without
a tuner. They eventually got the stamp of approval from the Federal Communications
Communists, but the machine had already shipped, so they built the entire
modulator into an outboard package.

It ended up being a bit more bulky compared to the Atari/Commodore onboard
75 ohm RF output, but it was so wonderfully reusable.

I always thought it was amusing to see that no one understood that the RF
output of an Atari or Commodore computer was really just a 75 ohm antenna
connection. Most people used an old television as a dedicated monitor, and
they'd go from the computer to the "TV/Game" switchbox, then to a 300-to-75
ohm impedance transformer
into the television. I simply bought an RCA-to-F-connector adapter (less
than a dollar, even at ripoff shack) and went straight into the 75 ohm antenna
input of the television. People looked at it and said "wait, you can *do*
that?!"